THE TURQUOISE PEN

JONNY COME LATELY

Noël R. King

Jonny wrote story after story. It was his favorite thing to do. In fact, he could never seem to get quite enough of it. He would finish one story and be filled with yearning to start another one right this minute. So off he’d go again.

As you can imagine, with this kind of impetus/desire/whatever you want to call it, Jonny’s stories piled up like, well, like a huge pile of stories sitting on his desk. (He much preferred pen and paper over computers or even typewriters.)

So we know that Jonny wrote lots of stories. He was all but addicted to it. That is a little strange in and of itself, but even stranger was the fact that they were never more than a single page long. Just when you thought a story was really going somewhere, you would come to the end of the doggone thing. Oh, it was infuriating to his readers! To be led on like that only to be crashed into a brick wall of an ending!

Well, they—the readers—complained mightily to Jonny about his short, abruptly ending stories. You might be surprised that he even had any readers left at this point, but he did. He did because his stories were so compelling. It was difficult to see a new story by Jonny and not read it. It took a hardy person or a really mean, bad person to be able to pass by one of Jonny’s stories without stopping to read it.

So they kept reading; they kept complaining, too, though, asking Jonny how he could be so cruel to them, so hardhearted as to give them such a lurch each and every time.

Jonny, after listening quietly to his complainers, would just smile and tell them he was sorry, but that’s just the way it was. The complainers would slouch away, vowing to never again read one of his stories, only to compulsively break down even before the week was out.

The truth of it was that Jonny was scared silly whenever he wrote, even as at the same time he felt so compelled to write and write and write. He was scared silly that his pen would just take off without him, or, more accurately, without his consent. He was scared silly that he would get trapped in his own stories, that his words would just drag him right in. Drag him to where? Oh, that’s just the point! He had no idea—that’s what scared him so.

Part of him longed to just let go and let it happen, to let a story take him over, to see what that would be like, but the bigger, scareder part of him made darn sure he always stopped just in time. Hence the bruising, slamming-into-the-wall sorts of endings.

As for the word muse, which somebody once made the mistake of mentioning to Jonny, he tried to avoid it at all costs. He hated the word; it filled him with terror. Weren’t muses the creatures that ripped you out of your own safe, little life and into their incomprehensible, terrifyingly unpredictable realms? He knew it was silly, really, that there were no such things as muses. Still . . . He was going to make darn sure he stayed away from them, real or not.

Jonny told me all this, confidentially of course, late one night at a party about 10 years ago. I am breaking that confidence now, as you can plainly see for yourself, because I heard something last week that sent shivers down my spine.

Somebody told me, having no idea what they were really telling me, that Jonny has been hard at work, nonstop now for the last three years, on a novel! Oh boy. I better stop now and lay down this pen. This is scaring me silly.

—As circumstances warrant, through her Turquoise Pen column Noël R. King, South Riding, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful things, including being scared silly.